In this episode we explore the intricate dynamics of family courts with Dr. Bandy Lee. Dr. Lee, an expert in violence hailing from Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, as well as the current president of the World Mental Health Coalition, delves into the tactics used by domestic violence offenders within the legal system and the profound consequences these actions have on family courts.
Family courts, which are meant to be havens of justice and protection, can unfortunately turn into challenging battlegrounds for victims of domestic abuse. In many cases, abusive partners, predominantly fathers, exploit these systems to manipulate and distance their victims, typically mothers, from their children. This manipulation perpetuates a cycle of power and control that can have severe mental, emotional, and financial consequences. Dr. Lee's insights provide a sobering perspective on the unhealthy patterns that can emerge within these courtrooms.
Our discussion doesn't end at the courtroom doors. We will also shed light on the often-overlooked issue of reunification camps and the questionable practices that occur within them. Through an in-depth exploration of the Catherine Kassenhoff case, we aim to uncover the underlying problems within these institutions. As we wrap up our conversation, we will explore potential solutions to rectify these injustices and offer a preview of Dr. Lee's forthcoming book on the family court crisis.
The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
In this episode we explore the intricate dynamics of family courts with Dr. Bandy Lee. Dr. Lee, an expert in violence hailing from Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, as well as the current president of the World Mental Health Coalition, delves into the tactics used by domestic violence offenders within the legal system and the profound consequences these actions have on family courts.
Family courts, which are meant to be havens of justice and protection, can unfortunately turn into challenging battlegrounds for victims of domestic abuse. In many cases, abusive partners, predominantly fathers, exploit these systems to manipulate and distance their victims, typically mothers, from their children. This manipulation perpetuates a cycle of power and control that can have severe mental, emotional, and financial consequences. Dr. Lee's insights provide a sobering perspective on the unhealthy patterns that can emerge within these courtrooms.
Our discussion doesn't end at the courtroom doors. We will also shed light on the often-overlooked issue of reunification camps and the questionable practices that occur within them. Through an in-depth exploration of the Catherine Kassenhoff case, we aim to uncover the underlying problems within these institutions. As we wrap up our conversation, we will explore potential solutions to rectify these injustices and offer a preview of Dr. Lee's forthcoming book on the family court crisis.
The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.
The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics multiple forms of violence and identity based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive, safe experience for all listeners.
Speaker 2:In this country, 31 million crimes 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes there is a murder. Every five minutes there is a rape. Every two to five minutes there is a sexual assault. Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us it's none of our business and I am proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. Dr Bandy Lee is a medical doctor, a forensic psychiatrist, author and a world expert on violence, who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before transferring recently to Columbia and Harvard. She's currently the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, the largest professional organization to address the problem of dangerous leadership and its contribution to a mental health pandemic. At Yale Law School, she taught clinical courses covering the mental health aspects of asylum law, criminal justice and veteran legal services. She also served as director of research for the Center for the Study of Violence, co-founded Yale's Violence in Health Study Group at the McMillan Center for International Studies and has led an academic collaborators project for the World Health Organization's Violence Prevention Alliance. She joins us to explore the psychological intersections between family violence and the family court and how domestic violence offenders exploit and manipulate gaps within the criminal justice system.
Speaker 1:Dr Lee, welcome to the podcast. Hello, thank you for having me. It's great to meet you and spend time with you. Today we're talking about violence, as we often do on this podcast, and you study violence and violent people. I'd love to understand a little bit about your background and what led you to pursue this area and if it's different from what you anticipated when you first began the work.
Speaker 3:Yes, I am rather unusual and, as a psychiatrist, to have studied violent behavior, because most people at the time believed that violence was an inevitable part of human life and that it was untreatable. But what was very surprising for me and my career trajectory coincided with the World Health Organization declaring violence a public health problem that we can study and prevent through scholarship methods and prevent even before it happens. So I was very lucky in the way that my desired area of study based on coming from a rather violent background of the Bronx when I was growing up in New York City that my area of interest coincided with fast development in scholarship and you wrote a book about it. In fact, it's a textbook called Violence an interdisciplinary approach to causes, cures and consequences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fascinating and that was published in 2019, I believe it's something I would love to read and learn more about, because I've talked with many experts over the years about violence and about, specifically, about the shortcomings and the dangers of family court, and it seems as though those two things should should not be in the same sentence.
Speaker 1:However, they are, and the family court can be a dangerous place, a unusual circumstance for a lot of people who enter into, especially if there's domestic violence in the relationship, and you as well have consulted on some very serious cases where abusers have manipulated the courts to strip parental rights from their victims, thereby alienating women and children from each other and, in some cases, destroyed the lives of women and children in the process. Unfortunately, when there are children in a home experiencing violence, those children are often used as pawns or a means to an end by the offender, who is typically the father, to further abuse and terrorize the survivor, who is typically the mother. Let's talk about family court. How do these situations of domestic violence and abuse play out in the family court, and what are the ramifications when the offending father succeeds in convincing the court that the mother is perhaps unfit?
Speaker 3:Yes, in my 25 years of experience as a forensic psychiatrist, working mostly with criminal and civil courts, what was most shocking has been what family courts do and their practice and what happens in family courts. I did not have exposure to family courts prior to it actually happening with my family. My sister was undergoing a divorce and what was apparently, on the surface, a normal divorce suddenly devolved into an incredible level of violence Her losing her parental rights, as you were mentioning, even though she was a primary caregiver for the children, and the children being transferred to their abuser. So what I learned subsequently is that this is actually a national crisis and an international crisis, as has been revealed in the recent United Nations Human Counsel report, in that family courts are often centers where violent individuals can not only continue to perpetrate their violence, but they could actually gain sole custody of their victims. They can retaliate against their former spouses for trying to leave or trying to protect their children, and also to gain financial benefit for essentially abducting and detaining the children that they had formerly abused. So you are correct in that family court is not something where you would imagine putting it together with violence, but I find that it's a place where the greatest level of unmitigated violence happens among all the courts. It also happens to be the court where they where there's a greatest profit to be gained. Most courts do not make money, and yet family courts have a multi-billion dollar profit rate every year for exactly doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 3:So so I think the violence that happens in family courts is closely tied to the violence that is done through basically adjudicating injustice at the expense of women and children, and it's rather complicated how they accomplish this, but doing so makes the perpetrator much more willing to pay or, if not pay, willing to lend their children.
Speaker 3:Well, that's actually a whole other area, but essentially they would be willing to pay more, and those who are victimized by the system would also be willing to give whatever they have to try to get their children to safety or themselves to safety.
Speaker 3:As we know, domestic violence is very common, and one in five children experience physical violence, one in four children experience some kind of violence, and one in four girls experience sexual violence, and so a lot of these cases that come to family court end up being domestic violence cases or child abuse cases. I think the rate is about 70 to 80%, although I believe that it probably is much higher, family courts being often sealed and under sealing order or secretive Initially to protect children, the identity of children, but it has actually worked against them, and that courts can do whatever they wish and not be detected. That also makes it very difficult for objective studies to be done. But now there are dozens of studies that show that abused children are more likely to go to the abusing parent rather than to the safe, loving and protecting parent and because of the prevalence of child abuse it becomes an enormous problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these cases are incredibly complicated and you know, I work for Genesis Women's Shelter and Support and we provide free legal services to women who experience domestic violence, and we do that because, very often, women who are victims of domestic violence cannot afford to pay for their own legal counsel, and representing themselves is really not an option when you're up against someone, as you describe, who has really strategically designed a legal team that will allow him to have the best outcomes and thereby have custody of the children. All of that takes an incredible toll on not just the mother, but also on the children. The outcomes are typically not what mom and kids want or had desired by trying to separate from the marriage and thereby all of that has an impact on everyone's mental health. Well, let's talk a little bit about how separating a mother from her children under these circumstances impacts her mental health and well-being, and when that happens, when there's a negative impact to her mental health, does that also influence family court proceedings?
Speaker 3:Yes, so I've been in about a dozen different family court proceedings and what I have found is that the most common reason for taking children from the usually the primary caregiver and usually the mother is by declaring them mentally unfit Is that a legal term?
Speaker 1:mentally unfit.
Speaker 3:It is a legal term, it's a legal determination that is usually highly dependent on expert testimony, that is, the testimony of mental health experts.
Speaker 3:But it's also been declared a global crisis of the family courts by the United Nations that they very typically engage poorly trained, unqualified experts to do the so-called expert testimony.
Speaker 3:And in fact I, as a fully qualified forensic psychiatrist in most settings and most courts are only happy to have me as an expert witness have found it extraordinarily difficult to be an expert witness in family courts.
Speaker 3:They do employ people with counseling backgrounds, mental health backgrounds and, increasingly, psychologists, but what they do is first, the family courts know they have a group of people, a pool, to draw upon to do the expert testimony, and so they, their expectations are known in advance and the so-called mental health experts understand that they are to essentially fix the results for the courts in the opposite direction of the truth, and this is truly an alarming and really unconscionable action on the part of these experts. But they're not trained enough Even some are not licensed that you cannot report them to their licensing boards. And because this kind of assignment is so lucrative for these experts so-called experts, in fact, some I have learned, have charged five to 20 times as much the rate I charge as a fully trained psychiatrist of the highest level of a forensic mental health expert. And this is because they are that much in demand by the abusers and the courts that cater to these abusers.
Speaker 1:So once again, you know he's kind of paying his way out of it, Exactly.
Speaker 3:And having the full force of the law to support him and be behind him. And because the tables are turned against the victims, the usually mothers become the perpetrators and they go to jail. They can be criminally stigmatized, they're sometimes confined in hospitals. They're psychologically broken in many ways. So they may end up being mentally ill. But that's not how they started. They started as fit mothers, perfectly mentally well and because of the incredible stress of losing their children.
Speaker 3:The worst thing that can happen to a mother, you might say, is to lose their children. And the children are often taken without any contact with the mother any longer, which means that they're as good as having died. Or, even worse, it's inculcated in them that their mother was bad and their mother was abusive. And if the children resist, if the children deny that and resist going to the father or the abuser, then nowadays there's been a boom in reunification camps, which I actually call torture camps. So what happens is that the child who is resisting the abusive parent because they don't wish to be hurt, are actually separated from the parent protecting them and placed in these camps, where sometimes they're handcuffed, sometimes they're beaten and starved until they recant the abuse and agree to be with their abusive parent.
Speaker 3:Now, children have these natural survival mechanisms to resist the abuser, but if this is, the only theory that they promote, is that the loving parent is alienating the child and has coached the child to resist the abusive parent.
Speaker 3:That's how they spin the narrative in family courts. The fact that false allegations of abuse are anywhere from 0.1 to 2%, especially when coming from the mother, but family courts treat up to 98% of allegations of abuse as false. So the theory they do it by is called parental alienation. In fact, the United Nations recommended that all governments around the world ban the use of that phrase, because that is the way that abusers and family courts have been able to turn around allegations of abuse into a parental alienation type of control that ends up in the child making up stories of abuse and resisting a perfectly fine parent. Of course, it couldn't be further from the truth, and the abuser, in fact, is the alienator. So they alleged parental alienation in order to engage in predatory alienation, and it truly is shocking, unbelievable and an immense human rights violation that family courts are perpetrating, and yet they're not held accountable because judges are immune, they have maximal discretion in family courts and they're able to seal their records.
Speaker 1:So let's back up, because you introduced a lot of different theories and ideas that some of them I've not heard of. Let's talk about reunification camps. Is that happening in the United States? Yes, and who institutes that type of a camp?
Speaker 3:So usually it's not a licensed mental health professional. Some in the past have been run by those who lost their licenses. So these camps are set up I think they term them as reeducation or educational camps so that a mental health license is not necessary and their family court connected. Many people have heard of the Kids for Cash scandal among judges in Pennsylvania, where judges got kickbacks for sending children for minor misbehavior to juvenile facilities, jails, and now something similar is happening with the family court's far more widespread, I would say. In fact, the reunification camps have become such a problem. In California at least, they have banned them, but there are others in Texas and others all around the country that have become notorious, of course, from the outside, because the family courts are able to set the narrative and they're supposed to be the fact finders.
Speaker 3:As I said, they can select which expert witness to use and they have a pool to draw from, usually very poorly qualified, and they can also stop any expert witness from entering. So what usually happens in my own case is that clients would hire me, designate me as an expert witness, and they propose to the court to have me as a witness, and the courts examine the credentials and then either permit or refuse. In fact refusals are extremely rare. But in family courts refusal is almost 100% At least that's been my experience and instead they choose these counselors with master's degrees at most, sometimes not even in mental health, and often not licensed people I usually say would not be employable anywhere else. And yet in family courts they're upheld as witnesses.
Speaker 3:The abusive parent is protected and given not just custody most of the time, but also child support, and it's thought that child support is the main reason why this is so prevalent in the United States, because child support can have any limit and the court decides what usually the mother will have to pay, and if she's not able to pay she can go to jail Debtors jail also has not disappeared.
Speaker 3:They happen in family court Also in most courts, especially criminal court, in order to incarcerate someone, you are required to undergo due process. In family court, due process is not required and the judge can simply decide to incarcerate someone.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the people who are doing this the abusive parents, the perpetrators. Let's talk about violence and the nature of abusers for a minute, because violence covers a broad area and, much like in your book, the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, to begin to understand violence, we have to understand behaviors that are abusive and, I guess, dangerous. What attracts some human beings to violent behaviors and conflict and others toward resolution and peace? What's happening with these individuals who become abusive?
Speaker 3:Well, in a nominally law abiding society or for the most part, I would still say this is a relatively law abiding society violent individuals are usually not condoned by society and they're not welcome in many settings. But what has happened is that many of the violent offenders have changed their methods. They have also evolved, if you will. Over time. In my 25 years of practice, what I've recognized is that most of the personality disorders the dangerous personality disorders that I used to see in jails and prisons almost exclusively were increasingly finding their places in corporate boardrooms or in politics or in everyday settings, and they have formed their methods of being able to continue the violence and abuse, even against society, in ways that generate more individuals who are disordered in this way and who become violent and therefore they spread the violence. Violence becomes more acceptable in mainstream society and more prevalent, as we are seeing in the concrete numbers.
Speaker 1:What are some of those disorders?
Speaker 3:Some of the disorders. Well, the main, the most well known, is antisocial personality disorder, which, by definition, is a sociopathic approach to life, violating the rights of other individuals, committing crimes, committing violence. There's a subgroup among them, or intersecting group, that requires special training to be able to diagnose, and that's a scenario specialty for myself. That is psychopathy, and what I'm finding, and what is becoming better known in the literature, is that psychopathic individuals, rather than committing overt violence, are increasingly engaging in covert violence, if you will, in other words, getting other societal structures to do their violence for them, such as these individuals who are using family courts to essentially extend their abuse of their former spouses or their children. And they also are extremely attracted to leadership positions, because that means that they have lots of instruments for domination and control, lots of power, exactly, and so we see the phenomenon of an increase in psychopathic individuals taking leadership positions.
Speaker 3:It became so bad that for lots of businesses, they have started to require a psychological fitness test for CEOs, particularly so that they would not inadvertently admit dangerous personalities. But of course, they are still managing to enter these positions because these types of psychological exams don't just depend on a personal interview. In fact, a personal interview is almost unhelpful at best and counter to our desire to diagnose, because these individuals are also highly manipulative and charming and they be guile and they can make themselves appear as the ideal candidate. So what you actually do is look for patterns of deception and patterns of victimization with other individuals and they can't do a very detailed exam for the screening tests, and so such individuals are still finding their way to top positions in society, and unfortunately, that has disproportionately affected women and children who go to family courts to be protected, and they find that instead, not only do they lose whatever protection they had among themselves, but that the abusers' violence becomes multiplied.
Speaker 1:In addition to all of that which is if that was not bad enough there are disparities across communities and populations, where some have more experiences of family violence and then even more serious setbacks and experiences in family courts. So because, when it comes to family violence, women across the country, and even more so in communities of color, are not just the recipients of abuse and violence, but are they're also being murdered by their partners at alarming rates. Let's talk about the disparities in communities of color and other underserved communities, who experience more violence, have even less opportunities in family court to get justice or even for women to have custody of their children. What's going on there? Why is it so pervasive in those communities?
Speaker 3:Well, underprivileged communities are always more vulnerable to violence, behavioral violence, structural violence and societal violence, especially in minority communities. That's true all across the world and we do find that with family courts. With family courts, however, I see kind of a bimodal distribution in that those who are violated against or murdered actually there are as many high income women who are murdered as there are low income, and that has to do with the revenue that comes with for the courts on behalf of the abusive parent Outside of family court. Oftentimes, minority groups and disadvantaged communities may have their children taken away for foster care rather than the children being given to their abuser. In fact, the rate of the abused children going to their abuser is actually less in the impoverished communities because foster care is more revenue generating in terms of federal funding being mobilized and the victimized parents being unable to fight back. So there are two different phenomena depending on the income range in the family courts.
Speaker 1:And those children are still separated from their mother, whether they go to the abusive parent or they go to foster care. Typically, neither one of those scenarios are very good for the children.
Speaker 1:Definitely not good for the mother. I want to talk about a specific case that you were somewhat involved in. I read an article published this summer in Ms Magazine about Catherine Kassanov. You were in touch with Kassanov during that time and perhaps you can provide us some background on the case what happened and then some insight about how things unraveled and led to her suicide.
Speaker 3:Yes, I was in touch with her actually professionally beforehand, though we had a common client. She was an attorney. Right, she was an attorney. She was an attorney admitted to the federal courts and was going to submit a federal complaint against a judge on behalf of a client whom I was evaluating.
Speaker 3:So I know for a fact that she was extremely intelligent, principled and also compassionate. So it's hard to imagine that such a qualified person would be an unfit mother. And yet she was deemed unfit. Her three children were taken from her and given to her abusive ex-husband, who spent the upwards of $4 million on the divorce in custody. That shows the degree to which money plays a role and which way the children go and what kind of money courts can generate for the lawyers involved, the evaluators involved. They all kind of work as a team. Even the attorneys representing the unfavorred litigant that is, usually the mother know that they have to go along and play along to keep their jobs, keep their licenses and to be rewarded financially. And so what we find in family courts is that the adversarial system may have generated this kind of acrimonious playbook on the part of family courts, but the adversarial advantage does not apply. I've seen these scenarios play out in so many courtrooms now. It's almost like an identical playbook, and it's usually the fit parent who is labeled mentally ill, because they will not likely fight back in aggressive ways as abusers would, and they will not threaten or try to attack, for example, but rather they will be broken.
Speaker 3:And BBC recently came out with reportings because, quite exceptionally, the UK government allowed reporters to enter into family courts. They recognized the pervasive problem and now they've started reporting on these courts, and the first article they came out with showed the dozens of women who have died as a direct result of family court. They died of heart attacks, what's called broken heart syndrome. They died of cancer, like Catherine Kasimov. Well, she chose medically assisted suicide, but she was told she had a terminal return of cancer. Others by suicide, again. You can only imagine.
Speaker 3:The worst thing that can happen to a mother is to lose her child and to be ordered to have no contact with them, which is the usual, if not very common. It's as if your child has died, and also for the children, it's bad enough to be separated from your loving parent, the primary caregiver that you have known all your life Perhaps the worst torture a child could go through. And yet the child is transferred to the custody of their abuser, who has tormented them, raped them and may have been murderous toward them, and indeed do murder them. The Centre for Judicial Excellence has documented as many family court-generated murders that they could, and it's now close to a thousand or the last 15 years or so. But we know that family court-generated deaths are far more common than that, because many are unreported or many are unassociated. For every murder we know that there are dozens of suicides that happen.
Speaker 1:So I heard you are actually writing a new book on this topic. Is that right?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Here is the case of family court. Yes, that's a tentative title.
Speaker 3:I believe that I have a special look into these family courts, being an expert witness. As an expert witness, I can examine all the evidence. In fact, the clients often give me dozens of concrete evidence that are basically would form factual bases in most courts and in fact, most of the time the abuse is beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal court standards. And yet family courts will shun them, stonewall them, not accept them or confiscate them and bury them. Expert reports are considered part of evidence.
Speaker 3:Mine are usually refused. They would give any excuse not to accept it, whereas, as I said before, poorly trained, unqualified, so called experts reports are accepted as evidence. So, having seen this and knowing the fact knowing the fact because those from the outside have no way of knowing that what family courts are doing is not only illegal but contrary to fact, because they determine who the providers of evidence are and when mothers, who essentially cannot help but be broken from these experiences, try to tell their story, most of them cannot because it's so beyond the realm of imagination or prior expectation. But even those who do are not believed because, as we agreed before, these stories are so unbelievable. And yet these practices are widespread, almost uniform, across all 50 US states. I am told that this has been going on for decades, starting in the early 80s especially, and now the model has been exported abroad to the point where the United Nations is calling it a global crisis.
Speaker 1:The family courts is a global crisis of violence against women and children.
Speaker 3:It's happening through the family courts.
Speaker 1:So the book that you're writing is kind of the expose right, much like these conversations. Is it also potentially a playbook for providing some solutions to redesigning family court, because it sounds like we need a complete reboot?
Speaker 3:Yes, I believe that family courts should be eliminated altogether. I believe in abolition because family courts in the first place were set up in a way that they would not be held accountable, that juvenile cases and criminal cases if there was a family case open, they would all funnel back to the family court. And I have heard of family court judges who try to do the right thing are shunned and ostracized because they're protecting their revenue and it's become a self-culture of the courts. Also, there's an agreement with federal courts that federal courts will not touch family courts. They can't be appealed because they're not bound to any law because of the wide discretion that they're allowed.
Speaker 1:So, that being the case, what are some takeaways for us? We need takeaways for people listening, because we understand this is a huge issue. It's a dangerous issue. It's threatening the livelihood of the next generation, that specifically being children. It is further diminishing women and it is also just empowering male supremacy, right. By continuing to allow family courts to function in this way. So, whether layperson or practitioner, or even legislators, what are some takeaways? Calls to action for all of us.
Speaker 3:I think what you're doing is terrific by airing these issues. This really needs to be reported on by those who have seen the inside, such as myself, or court reformers, or many lawyers, have become activists, and mothers who usually undergo this believing that they are all alone usually by the time because courts have such public trust and most people cannot believe that a court would be behaving in this way that family members, friends, acquaintances all come to believe that there must be something about the mother and turn against them and they become stigmatized by the judgements alone. So encouraging mothers and some fathers who are victimized by the system to seek support and to find a common voice, not to be intimidated and to bring their voices together. And I think, ultimately, there needs to be legislative changes, structural changes.
Speaker 1:Dr Lee, we're out of time, but I appreciate your insight and your passion for this topic and I look forward to learning more in your new book. Where can people learn more right now about your work? What's your website?
Speaker 3:My website is bandyleecom, that's V-A-N-D-Y-L-E-Ecom. I put out a newsletter on the family courts as well as I'm on Twitter and people can all find me there. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe. Registration for the 2024 Conference on Crimes Against Women is now available. The 2024 conference will be held in Dallas, texas, at the Sheraton Dallas, may 20th through the 23rd. Visit our website at conferencecaworg to learn more and register today, and follow us on social media at National CCAW for updates about the conference, featured events, presenters and more.